Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @10:28AM
from the if-you-can-read-this-message-the-internet-is-down dept.

judgecorp writes "Britain's Channel 4 screened Blackout, a drama about a cyber-attack which crashes the national power grid. The show was silly enough, with a strong message about the dangers of lighting candles in such a situation, but the Twitter responses were even better. The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid."

How do you suggest the control room communicate with all the various power stations and electricity consumers across the country then?

Perhaps, I don't know, they could piggyback a communication network onto the physical power network they own, airgapped from the internet? Maybe they could call each other on the phone like they did for the first ~80 years of the grid's existence?

What you say is true, although if you air-gapped this network from the Internet, you'd need to gain access to a node that is on that network in order to compromise it or physical access to the lines themselves. The network nodes will likely be in controlled locations, and even if they aren't, they're at least going to be local to the country running them.

Obviously, gaining physical access to the network cables would be much simpler than that, but you'd have to get resources on the ground locally to tap tha

And if fiber optic I believe it would be extremely difficult to tap into the lines discretely if designed to notice such attempts. You can't just "twist on" a tap like an electrical line, you pretty much have to sever the cable and splice in an optical junction. If there's a handshake signal every few milliseconds it would be extremely difficult to tap into the line without raising an alarm. Even more so if the signal was monitored for any power drops that would result from an attempt to graft on to a pa

Tapping optical networks is very much "twist on". You just bend the cable enough so that a bit of light leaks out (after carefully stripping the jacket. There may even be off-the-shelf devices for this.

The whole point of "quantum encryption" is to solve the problem of how easy it is for a well-funded attacker to tap the optical cables in your datacenter without you ever noticing.

Back in the 80s my work was related to power generation. So I know that the local power grid had its own communication network, there was no internet in the area at the time. Worked just fine for them.

Speaking as someone currently working in the electrical utility industry, I can tell you how my company does it. We use a combination of things, depending on what's most cost-effective, but the vast majority of our communications are done via microwave relay. We actually set up our own towers, get FCC licenses, and transmit private microwave signals to our substations and to our satellite control centers, as well as our generation plants. Some of it is proprietary serial protocol (DNP, very common in the utility industry) and some of it is standard TCP/IP based.

We run multiple networks over these microwave links (which ARE isolated from each other both in microwave frequencies and in physical equipment), as our satellite offices also get corporate network connectivity and Internet connectivity via microwave as well, communicating to our HQ and using its Internet hardline.

For locations where we couldn't set up microwave, we sometimes use private leased lines (direct, always-on, no-dial telephone connections, but these we only use if we have to because they're the most expensive). On a few occasions we use spread-spectrum radio, or as an absolute last resort we use GPRS radio over mobile networks. This last solution is NOT the same network as what a cell phone or other consumer access point goes through. We are basically leasing access to their mobile tower for a "private line" more or less.

In ALL cases, whether it's microwave, radio, leased line, or anything else, over-the-air communications are end-to-end encrypted, because yes we're totally aware that OTA stuff can be intercepted and eavesdropped, even point-to-point microwave links. It is also a closed, air-gapped network. As I said, the Internet and corporate network stuff to our remote offices goes over its own separate microwave channel with separate air-gapped communications equipment that's independent of the equipment talking to substations and the like.

It appears that you are not taking the time to think through the problem that a power plants control center has.

> For the fine details of current usage the plant should just respond to voltage changes on the lines.

Yes the plant could tell how much power it is providing by monitoring the out put lines.

You think you know an algorithm that would provide the plant with the information on how to reliably and economically contribute to the power grid based only on the voltages of lines connect to the plant its

Even full automation would probably not be an issue if the control systems were heavily firewalled - i.e. no sort of network link, just a single unsigned number delivered via parallel port that indicates desired power output. No buffers to overrun, no data structures to exploit, just a single N-bit desired power indicator that gets read at regular intervals. Couple that with a post-firewall automated sanity check that requires human confirmation for any abnormal behaviors and you're pretty solidly insulat

Just to chime in with a "me, too!" but The Day After is very much a Hollywood version of nuclear war. Threads (and to a lesser extent 1965's The War Game which inspired the structure of the film but was banned from being broadcast) is essentially some of the most harrowing TV you can put yourself through. If you like your post-apocalyptic stuff then despite its pitifully small budget Threads is hard to beat; just don't expect to feel too chipper afterwards.

It's might not be well known outside of the UK, but part of what made Threads so chilling was the fact that the documentary-style delivery was done partly with excerpts from Protect and Survive, a real PI film, just to show how ineffective and futile the advice being given out by the government would really be. I think the nearest US equivalent is Duck and Cover.

One interesting factoid I learned from David E Hoffman's book The Dead Hand [theguardian.com] was that, according to Reagan's biography, the only time the Gipper mentioned being depressed in his diaries was after watching The Day After. Dunno if he or Iron Maggie caught Threads, that probably would have brought the whole Cold War to an abrupt stop. That flick is about as grim as can be imagined. Babby kom!

TDA really apparently did a number on Reagan, though - before that he was hawkish and then some, albeit realizing tha

While researching "Germs" the authors found the largest abandoned ex-Soviet bio-warfare site secured with a rusty bicycle lock, guarded by one untrained part-time guy who hadn't been paid in six months. The 'tip' they gave him for letting them wander around the site was larger than his normal paycheck would have been.

No one believed or should have believed Red Dawn. It was clearly a work of fiction in a movie theater, not a television broadcast formatted like the nightly news (with the same talking heads as the real news covering the story).

The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid.

A friend of mine was getting ready to get in his car one day and noticed the neighbor woman was having an issue with her car. He stopped over and asked what was wrong and she said it wasn't doing anything when she turned the key. He tried and noticed she didn't have any dash lights or anything and explained that it may have been a dead battery. She said to him "I thought cars ran on gasoline?"

I've encountered, on more than one occasion, people with the opposite misunderstanding. They don't think their cars will start because the power is out on their block. There's also a lot of people that don't realize corded phones will still work with no power (in most situations) - probably the biggest obstacle to VoIP adoption in my area.

People used to live in houses made of wood lit entirely by candles. Sconces [amazon.com] and gas lighting are kind of new. Oil lanterns were a big thing for a really long time, and if you knock one of those over you have a problem; candles at least go out or not, oil spills and causes a huge blaze.

I remember the time my old 74 nova stalled in the middle of the road and I thought it was because my alternator was bad and my battery lost charge. Anyway a woman and her family pulled into her house. I yelled over,"Hey lady, I need a jump. Can you give me a jump start?" She hurried her family into the house, and my friend was dying of laughter.

Um, we were talking about the British, but if you want to bring "the colonies" into it, there's lots of places that don't need no stinkin' air conditioning. There's more to the US than LA and New York.

You need to adjust the time scale a bit - the drama showed the near-collapse of civilisation taking a matter of days.

And here come spoilers:

- One of the things I liked was the show of futility at the end. One of the characters, desperate for food and water for his child, resorts to looting a shop. He films and inventories everything, intending to repay once the crisis is over. Instead he finds another survivor huddling inside, one even more desperate and terrified than he is, who immediately goes into a confused panic and beats him to death - not because this unexpected lurker is trying to steal food himself, but because he is startled, paranoid and on a hair-trigger after the few days of hell he has just endured. The final shot of the scene is of the attacker's face as he realizes what he just did.

- The survival enthusiast, a prepper who treats the whole event with glee that his precautions were proven worthwhile, starts out by stockpiling water and checking food reserves - confident that he is ready. The drama here comes not from the survival efforts he takes, but how his family handle them. He's been irritating them for years with his 'freakish' behavior of keeping stockpiles, asking to move to the country and insisting on teaching them how to purify dirty water, and now he has a chance to shine. But far from becoming the hero he envisioned, his wife craves normalcy so much she can't stand his infuriating cheerfulness and efforts to help. She rejects all of his advice out of hand, tearing the family apart as all rationality is lost - even accusing him of poisoning their daughter with his home-sterilized water, and just shouting over him he explains he hasn't even opened that bottle yet. That's a family fight done well: There are two sides to the argument, and each one is incapable of even understanding why the other is upset.

This isn't a drama about the power cut. That's just a device. This is a drama about urban populations in crisis conditions, and it would be valid no matter what the crisis is - power cut, flooding, riots, collapse of government, even prolonged heavy snow. It's a story of human nature as sociary crumbles: Desperate, often irrational, the facade of morality gradually giving way to the simple instinctive need to protect one's self and one's family no matter the cost to others.

The middle-class survivalist, "generator man" as many have been calling him was the man who went to politely loot the supermarket at the end. And it was him who did the killing, climaxing at the moment the power came back on, with the now recording CCTV being shown capturing him at that moment with blood on his hands. Some noted the irony of capers and cous-cous being the only foods left there. It was a nice touch.

It was difficult to follow the fight, as it was shot in 'extreme shakeycam' form from the mobile phone POV. I probably misinterpreted the outcome.

What happened to Generator Man's wife? She seemed to disappear, probably around the point I left the room to make a cup of national-grid-heated tea.

I would guess from her disappearance from the screen, the fact that he is with one child and the arguments leading up to that scene that she has gone elsewhere either temporarily or permanently. It's not made clear, although considering the only source of information we have is (according to the premise) footage shot by him, it wouldn't be.

In the week that we lost power following the Alabama Tornado outbreak there were people driving around offering their food to strangers. The only acts of desparation were driving long distances to unaffected areas to purchase ice or generators. I'd say it would take a bit longer than a week for society to collapse in places that aren't already impoverished.

I also think it'd likely take more than a week. But you also have to remember that the tornados while devastating were rather tightly localized. If your entire country or the world is affected you'd likely see a much worse outcome. There wouldn't be any influx of aid workers and supplies from unaffected areas.

A prevailing attitude in Europe is with a decline of civilization, government, and social order, people will turn to animalistic barbarism within days.

No, it isn't cultural, other than a form of "elite panic" where the rich and powerful believe that society is only held together by the institutions that they themselves are in charge of. It is really self-fullfilling prophecy that tends to wreck the natural instinct of most humans to help each other in times of crisis.

I think it was inspired a lot by the London riots - a few days of fights and looting with no really apparent cause. What started as a minor police incident somehow lead to three days of chaos in the streets. It scared a lot of people simply for being so inexplicable and unexpected.

Half the population isn't dumber than the average. That's not what average means. (pun intended)

If intelligence follows a normal distribution (and the results of most intelligence tests, at least, tend to support that conclusion), then half of the population will be less intelligent than the mean.

Intelligence measurements such as IQ can be arbitrarily calibrated to a normal distribution, at least near the center of the curve, because researchers don't really know any better and it seems to make life easier for them. However, there's no reason for the tails representing dumb people and very smart people to be equal in size other than trying to make the data fit an easy to analyze mathematical curve. But that's largely irrelevant, as the point I was making was that many people have a fundamental misun

IQ is forced to adhere to a normal distribution. In reality, 'intelligence' isn't normally distributed. Hardly any measure of a non-random phenomenon for a population will be normally distributed. Forcing IQ to a normal distribution is one of its critical flaws.

The cellular and phone networks in the US actually have batteries and generators to power them so people can use them when power is out to report those outages. For the POTS network I think the backup is federally mandated, not sure on the cell network.

The cellular and phone networks in the US actually have batteries and generators to power them so people can use them when power is out to report those outages. For the POTS network I think the backup is federally mandated, not sure on the cell network.

The cellular backups only last for a day or two, at most. In the northeast we lost power from hurricane Sandy last year for a few days, and the cellular networks didn't last all that long.
Fortunately, they're also high on the priority list for restoring power, so they were some of the first things to come back.

There's an American show called Blackout from 2012 where they take people extremely likely to freak out, put them in a pitch black room, and have them touch random things or find things or whatever. It has fake (and real) spiders and dogs and people and slime and is generally completely hilarious. It's all a game show so naturally it's timed and the fastest person wins.

Anyone read Hyundai's tweet? That's not far off, Hyundai. Last time the power was out for 3 days here due to a tornado, we hooked an 800W inverter up to our Chevy S10 and idled it like a generator for at least 20 hours to power our retail computers. Really, it can be any brand car though, lol.
Generator = $a lot
High wattage inverter = $100-ish USD + car you already have
Also, 16 gallon gas tank in the car. What's up now, generator sellers? Lol.

It really depends on what your needs are, but running a 150HP truck engine at idle uses about 7-10x as much gas as a 2HP engine at 100% load, so your fuel storage is really only equivalent to 2 gallons. It's a good solution for a rare event of limited duration. Just sucks when you drain the fuel tank and can't get to the filling station... With diesels you also need to make sure you run the engine hard after doing it to burn off the wet-stacking.

That 100A is probably when the engine is turning somewhere near 1800-2200RPM or greater as well. At "idle" speeds, 600-700rpm, you might only receive 20-25A.

Prior to the insert of a "high idle" mode into the computers, police cruisers used to end up with dead batteries WHILE RUNNING because the power needed to run the on board lights, computer, radio, etc would be more than the alternator produced at standard idle.

My 3500W continuous generator, with a Honda small engine clone, was $275 on sale. It takes u

STOP THE PRESSES! SOME SHOW TRIGGERS LOLS!! I can see timothy scrambling like a madman to get this thread out of the submission queue and onto the front page. This in the running for the most ridiculous title I've ever seen here, even worse then the gloriously daft "OMG PONIES LOL!!!"

DHS and FEMA are doing a drill in the middle of november regarding this exact subject. I think it's called Grid-X2 or something like that. They are not actually switching anything off though, it's just a glorified conference call.

There were some panic articles last month about FEMA ordering a bunch of food, medicine and ammo in preparation for the drill due on Oct 1st.